Whitney McDonald 09:51:44
Hello and welcome to the buzz of fin AI news podcast. My name is Whitney McDonald and I’m the editor of finaI news. Fin AI news has rebranded from bank automation news, marking the next step in our mission to lead the conversation on innovation and Financial Services Technology. Joining me today, February 9, 2026 is Nikki Katz, head of digital at Bank of America. She is here to discuss how her team ensures the bank’s digital channels are keeping up with emerging technology and meeting client needs overall. Nikki, thanks so much for joining me,

Nikki Katz 09:52:13
absolutely and thanks for having me on the show. Very excited to chat. So yeah, I’m head of digital Bank of America, and what that means is that we have 59 million clients that access their bank accounts, their loans, retirement, etc, through our digital channels, and my team is responsible for ensuring that those digital channels are meeting our client needs. So that means we look after our mobile app, our websites, Erica, our AI virtual assistant, etc, and so yeah, we’ve got designers and data scientists and product managers and really the whole gamut of folks who decide what we’re going to deliver to our clients digitally, and then are responsible for making it happen.

Whitney McDonald 09:53:01
Well, let’s kind of start big picture here. Obviously, that’s 59 million clients. Is not a small feat to manage and look after in terms of accessing digital channels. Maybe big picture here. Bank of America, obviously, is a big player in the AI game. There’s investments made, you know, across the institution, maybe tell me a little bit about that AI strategy and how it feeds into these digital channels.

Nikki Katz 09:53:27
Yeah, absolutely. And what I love is, we’ve been in the AI game for a very, very long time, well before generative AI took the world by storm. And so we’ve got, you know, as a company, we’ve got a lot of patents. For example, we’ve got over 8000 patents, and at this point, over 1500 of those are AI or machine learning related. So almost 20% of our portfolio just goes to show the amount of research and effort that goes into thinking through how we do AI. And so AI at the bank, it touches everything we do. So we have client facing technologies, the leverage AI. We’ve got employee facing there’s areas where we use AI for our operations or for our you know, even how we write code, of course. And so it really is in everything we do, just as one example, that I think speaks to all of us who use bank accounts and credit cards, etc. Is in the fraud space alone, we have over 50 different AI models that help us make sure that we catch fraud quickly and are able to identify what’s, you know, good guy and bad guy behavior. And so, again, just an example. We really do use it across all of our eight lines of business and in everything from the most client facing to the most back of house.

Whitney McDonald 09:54:44
Yeah, maybe we can take that one step further. Obviously, you have to determine where AI is the right fit, making those decisions, obviously across the industry, and, you know, broader industries as well, everyone’s making those decisions right now. Where is AI the right fit? Where maybe, is it not the right fit? How do you decide that at the bank, internal feedback, piloting, you know, kind of give me a little insight here.

Nikki Katz 09:55:13
Yeah, so, so a combination of things, I think, at the heart of everything we do, we think about technology, including AI as being in service of really helping make our clients financial lives better. So the first question we’re going to ask is, what’s the client need that we’re trying to address? And only then do we get into what’s the right solution, and maybe that’s AI. It could be a bunch of other technologies or solutions, etc, but that’s the first thing we ask is, what’s the need? And same with employee facing what are our employees? You know, what do they need? How do we help them? So that’s the first part. We then balance it with a risk based approach. So being in a highly regulated industry, that’s it’s a whole other ball game right then than it is for some other companies. So for us, we have to think about all the many rules and laws and regulations that we have to comply with, and that’s just the legal and risk side. We also want to think about ensuring that we maintain client trust. Our business is a trust based business, so somewhere in between client need and laws, rules and regulations, there’s also a place of how do we operate in such a way that continues to build on that client trust. So when you take all that together, it very quickly becomes obvious that there’s places where AI is a great fit and there’s places where it’s less of a good fit. And to give some examples, right in the world of generative AI, we are still talking about hallucinations. Well, I’ll tell you if I. To say, hey, Erica, which is our AI assistant, I need you to send $20 to Whitney for dinner last night, and Erica had a hallucination. That would be not very welcome, right? So we can’t afford any any mistakes like that. We need really high level of accuracy, 100% accuracy in most cases. So that’s not a great application of generative AI as a result, but there’s a lot of other things we are using. So for example, other AI technologies, natural language processing, for example, predictive analytics, etc, are a much better fit. And then similarly, generative AI absolutely does have a place in other parts of our of our experience in our portfolio, and we use it extensively in things where we’re able to have a human in the loop in order to ensure that accountability and transparency, etc. And to give one example is today. For example, we have our bankers. They meet with clients all day, and it used to be that that took a lot of prep for every meeting they’d spend hours looking through market data and client information to make sure they really provide a great service. Well, today, generative AI can take that, summarize information, do quick searches, put together a nice briefing document that shaves hours for our bankers and allows them to come really well prepared and spend their time on high value conversations.

Whitney McDonald 09:58:00
Yeah, I love that example, bringing human in the loop, you know, being aware that, you know, it doesn’t need to be all AI on a certain process. I think that example of, you know, prepping bankers for those in person, or for those client conversations, you’re not taking the banker out, but you’re adding Gen AI as a as a resource, as a time saver. You know, throughout the client experience as well. Now you mentioned Erica. We’re, of course, familiar with Erica, the AI driven assistant. Maybe we can kind of talk about the evolution of Erica. I know it’s being iterated often, obviously AI has changed and evolved itself. Maybe you can kind of tell me where Erica stands, you know, recent changes, updates, how it’s being used.

Nikki Katz 09:58:44
Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, Erica has been a long journey for us. So it’s funny, we were talking about this yesterday and realized that Erica is closing in on a decade, because it launched in 2018 so it’s, you know, we got a couple we got a birthday in a couple years, there was going to be a big deal, but to the point you made today, Erica really acts, as we call it, a Guide By Your Side for our clients. So it’s really there to serve kind of two functions. One is really being that concierge and helping our clients find things quickly, get things done quickly. The second piece is almost like Mission Control, so giving that feedback loop to clients of here’s how you’re doing on your financial journey, and here’s things you need to pay attention to. And so when you think about what that looks like, a couple examples that I love are, for example here, this is near and dear for me being in Los Angeles. So in 2025 we had the awful wildfires at the beginning of the year. And so overnight, Erica was suddenly starting to get all these questions about this word wildfires. Well, Erica is a financial assistant. Erica doesn’t really know much about the weather, and so we have to very quickly train Erica to understand, okay, when people are talking about wildfires, here’s really what they’re looking for. They’re looking for our Client Assistance Program, or they’re curious as to, you know, what their balance is, and can they afford to go get a hotel because their house is in danger and they’ve just been evicted, or rather, evacuated. And so those are things that we had to really quickly adjust to, as a great example of things happening kind of in more modern time. And I guess a more fun note, you know, Bank of America has been in the news for our sports sponsorships of late, and we’ve done a lot around soccer of course and and also golf and marathons. And so one of the things I love about the approach that we’ve taken to sports is that it’s very community based. And so as an example, we have this great program called golf with us, and it’s really about getting youth exposure to golf as a sport, and so Erica is able to create insights and notify families who are within a certain radius of participating golf courses. Hey, you’ve got kids in this age range. Did you know there’s this cool program? And so that’s just again, another example of Erica offering value to our community and to our clients, sometimes in these more subtle ways and sometimes in very direct financial ways. And as you said, you know, we’re constantly tuning Erica. We’re constantly improving Erica and adding features So more to come.

Whitney McDonald 10:01:13
Yeah, no. I mean, I’ve been along the Erica journey, and it’s definitely something that you see update. Obviously you have, you know, folks are using it. There is the adoption we see that quarter over quarter, even just when you post earnings and what those adoption numbers are and iterating something that is being used by your clients. Now, obviously agentic AI seems to be a buzz in 2020. Six, maybe kind of talk to me about how you approach emerging technology, yeah,

Nikki Katz 10:01:46
and I think you know, before, before, before we go into the future view, I do want to double click on something you just said, which is, I think the best part, in terms of a best indicator of how well it’s going with Erica, is exactly like you said, we have, at this point, we have about 50 million clients who have used Erica. But my favorite stat is that they have engaged with Erica for almost 19 million hours. And so when you talk about the value the clients have gotten from this investment and this experience, it’s been pretty incredible, over 3 billion interactions. So the numbers are just staggering and and continuing to grow. We’re, in fact, continue to grow our active user base and interaction counts, and so to the point around where we’re going, I think it’s Erica continues to be at the center of our client relationships in many ways, and almost that center of the service experience that clients have with us. And so even clients who need to actually get someone on the phone often start with Erica and find that, you know, 98% of the time Erica is able to answer the question, and when they do need to talk to someone, Erica can shortcut that process a little bit and get them to the right person immediately, instead of having to be transferred or anything like that. So Erica really has become the hub of our customer service experience. And so as we think about the future and innovation, and you know, we we’re investing constantly, so we’ve continued to increase our spend in this space. So in fact, our AI investment is going up year over year. We’re investing about $4 billion a year in new technology initiatives, which includes things like Erica. And so the investment is definitely there. And as far as that future, I think you know, agentic is again, it kind of falls into that. Do clients need it? And from a risk perspective, are we there yet? Do we really want our clients ready to have an agent acting on their behalf, in their money in real time. The approach we’re taking so far continues to keep the client in the loop and a human in the loop. And so you’re going to see a lot of changes as we progress up that up that ladder. So things like, over the coming year, we’re going to continue to add more insights, more areas where Erica can help. Erica is continuing to gain expertise across our lines of business, which means that clients are now able to talk to Erica about things like retirement or investments. We’re continuing to invest on the business side in cash pro chat, which is their equivalent client facing experience on the business banking side, and so we’re going to continue to invest in making Erica and its derivatives across the bank smarter about our own business, smarter about our client needs, and continue to be able to be more proactive in offering help. Now, the end of that continuum naturally leads to a more agentic future, but I think for now, our focus is ensuring that we continue to provide relevant information, timely information, make things simple for our clients.

Whitney McDonald 10:04:48
Yeah, and I think it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning, too. You still have the the regulation, the trust, all of those, the foundation before, you know, just tapping into to new technology, but if and when that’s the right path, being ready and nimble when it’s the right move. Now, a little bit more on the tangible side, plans for the year ahead. What’s the plan or priority for you and your team for this year?

Nikki Katz 10:05:17
Oh, we’ve got so much in stock. Again, I get excited about the there’s always the glitzy sports stuff, and we’re continuing to make sure that that’s something we’re offering to our clients. So you know, whether that’s, you know, soccer related art on credit cards and supporting that, etc. But as far as digital experience, you know, we’re continuing to focus on, sometimes it’s just the blocking and tackling in some areas, right? So continue to make sure that we’re reducing friction, making it easier to open accounts and get started using your accounts, making it easier to find information. We have a lot of great partnerships that are going to be highlighted in the in the digital experiences we build. But but to be honest, Whitney, we make over 1000 different enhancements to our digital experience every year. So that list is long.

Whitney McDonald 10:06:08
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